The anger comes from not being willing to choose something else. -Bashar

If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself.
If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself.
Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation. ~Lao Tzu~

"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I wrote down "happy". They told me I didn't understand the assingnment, and I told them they didn't understand life"

-- John Lennon.

I'm not 100% sure if John Lennon said this, but I just saw this in a picture and thought it was very good.

Arcelius wrote:"I must create a system of my own or be enslaved by another man's". William Blake

LoneBear wrote:"We need to stop worrying about the rights of the individual and start worrying about what is best for society." --Hillary Clinton

"If you met them in person, you would probably instantly like any of these intelligent, verbal, likeable, even charismatic people. This is their greatest cover, since we often expect great evil to 'appear' evil, led by media portrayals of evil as causing changes in the face and demeanor of people, or marking them like the biblical Cain."
-- Svali

"You talk the talk ... do you walk the walk?" Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket

"To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." - Zbigniew Brzezinski

"We have a large public that is very ignorant about world affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans." - ibid.

"[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant." - ibid.

"In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason." - ibid.

"[...]nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state." - ibid.

"History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy." - ibid.

"This is more than a war against terrorism. This is a war against the citizens of all countries. The current elites are creating so much fear that people don't know how to respond. But they must remember. This is a move to implement a world dictatorship within the next five years. There may not be another chance."
- Johannes B. Koeppl, former German defense ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner

LoneBear wrote:You'd be surprised how many people are actually more afraid of success than failure. Failure is the lazy man's excuse--"Oh, I tried and failed, so someone else will have to do it!" That's what I hear from most people these days. They WANT to fail, because if they succeeded, they might have to do something with their life. The fastest way to grow is to do--and if you fail, learn from your mistakes and do again. You'll be surprised at the outcome--and how resistant you probably are to being successful!

Manly P. Hall wrote:The true subject of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy is the will; the object of his philosophy is the elevation of the mind to the point where it is capable of controlling the will. Schopenhauer likens the will to a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the intellect, which is a weak lame man possessing the power of sight. The will is the tireless cause of manifestation and every part of Nature the product of will. The brain is the product of the will to know; the hand the product of the will to grasp. The entire intellectual and emotional constitutions of man are subservient to the will and are largely concerned with the effort to justify the dictates of the will. Thus the mind creates elaborate systems of thought simply to prove the necessity of the thing willed.

Genius, however, represents the state wherein the intellect has gained supremacy over the will and the life is ruled by reason and not by impulse. The strength of Christianity, said Schopenhauer, lay in its pessimism and conquest of individual will. His own religious viewpoints resembled closely the Buddhistic. To him Nirvana represented the subjugation of will. Life--the manifestation of the blind will to live--he viewed as a misfortune, claiming that the true philosopher was one who, recognizing the wisdom of death, resisted the inherent urge to reproduce his kind.